Sony Altered ‘Concussion’ Film to Prevent N.F.L. Protests, Emails Show

In the movie “Concussion,” Will Smith portrays Bennet Omalu, whose work helped diagnose the disease known as C.T.E. in football players.Credit
Sony Pictures

When Sony Pictures Entertainment decided to make a movie focusing on the death and dementia professional football players have endured from repeated hits to the head — and the N.F.L.’s efforts toward a cover-up — it signed Will Smith to star as one of the first scientists to disclose the problem. It named the film bluntly, “Concussion.”

In the end even Sony, which unlike most other major studios in Hollywood has no significant business ties to the N.F.L., found itself softening some points it might have made against the multibillion-dollar sports enterprise that controls the nation’s most-watched game.

In dozens of studio emails unearthed by hackers, Sony executives; the director, Peter Landesman; and representatives of Mr. Smith discussed how to avoid antagonizing the N.F.L. by altering the script and marketing the film more as a whistle-blower story, rather than a condemnation of football or the league.

“Will is not anti football (nor is the movie) and isn’t planning to be a spokesman for what football should be or shouldn’t be but rather is an actor taking on an exciting challenge,” Dwight Caines, the president of domestic marketing at Sony Pictures, wrote in an email on Aug. 6, 2014, to three top studio executives about how to position the movie. “We’ll develop messaging with the help of N.F.L. consultant to ensure that we are telling a dramatic story and not kicking the hornet’s nest.”

(A Sony spokeswoman, who did not make Mr. Caines available for an interview, said late Tuesday, after this article was published, that the consultant cited in Mr. Caines’s email was not an N.F.L. employee, but was hired to deal with the N.F.L.)

Another email on Aug. 1, 2014, said some “unflattering moments for the N.F.L.” were deleted or changed, while in another note on July 30, 2014, a top Sony lawyer is said to have taken “most of the bite” out of the film “for legal reasons with the N.F.L. and that it was not a balance issue.” Other emails in September 2014 discuss an aborted effort to reach out to the N.F.L.

The movie is due out in December, but the trailer was released Monday. It showed Smith as Bennet Omalu, whose work diagnosing a disease in American football players known as C.T.E. — a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated blows to the head — led to one of the N.F.L.’s biggest crises: a possibility that the game itself could be lethal.

Suicides by former star players, including Dave Duerson and Junior Seau, have heightened the scrutiny on the N.F.L., which has agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to settle a lawsuit brought by about 5,000 retired players, who accused the league of deliberately hiding the dangers of concussions.

The trailer showed several scenes depicting Dr. Omalu with jaw-dropping surprise in his lab and angrily demanding “the truth” from people who appear to be from the N.F.L. Many other scientists have built on Dr. Omalu’s work, which began in 2002, and the N.F.L. has since donated tens of millions of dollars to study the effects of concussions and develop ways of treating them.

The N.F.L. has declined to comment on the trailer or the movie, and several Sony executives, through a spokeswoman, declined to speak about the movie or its production and marketing strategy.

Mr. Landesman, who also wrote the movie, said in an interview that the email conversations do not show Sony bowing to the N.F.L., but rather trying to portray the characters and story as accurately as possible to reduce the chance that the league could attack the filmmakers for taking too much creative license.

He added that like many large companies, movie studios that take on controversial topics try to anticipate how their films might be criticized and prepare defenses. He confirmed that Sony lawyers deleted some material from the film, but he declined to elaborate on the cuts beyond saying that they did so to make the story “better and richer and fairer.”

Photo

Omalu in 2007. He is the forensic pathologist who identified chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head hits.Credit
Lisa Renee Kyle for The New York Times

Those changes, he said, did not alter the thrust of the story, which focuses on Dr. Omalu, a forensic pathologist who identified C.T.E., or chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

“We don’t want to give the N.F.L. a toehold to say, ‘They are making it up,’ and damage the credibility of the movie,” Mr. Landesman said of Sony’s efforts.

He added: “There were things that might have been creatively fun to have actors say that might not have been accurate in the heads of the N.F.L. or doctors. We might have gotten away with it legally, but it might have damaged our integrity as filmmakers. We didn’t have a need to make up anything because it was powerful and revelatory on its own.”

Mr. Landesman continued, “There was never an instance where we compromised the storytelling to protect ourselves from the N.F.L.”

Still, the issue of how to portray the story of players living with the lethal hazards of the game has been fraught, even for a studio that has no substantial ties to the N.F.L. (Steve Tisch, a co-owner of the New York Giants, has a production company located at Sony Pictures, but he is not involved with the movie. Ridley Scott, a producer, and Mr. Landesman are represented by WME Entertainment, which also works with the N.F.L.)

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The N.F.L. had previously pressured business partners to step back from issues that are potentially embarrassing to it.

In 2013, N.F.L. officials complained to ESPN executives about a documentary, “League of Denial,” that the network had produced with “Frontline,” detailing the league’s response to the dangers of head trauma. ESPN stopped working on the project with “Frontline,” which later broadcast it.

In 2004, the N.F.L. complained to the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, the parent company of ESPN, about a hard-hitting television series on the sports network that delivered an unsavory depiction of professional football players. The show ended after one season.

In this case, the emails, some of which were first reported on Reddit, suggested that Sony saw a dramatic story behind Dr. Omalu, a Nigerian immigrant who became a whistle-blower when he tried to warn the N.F.L. about the risk of playing football. Mr. Landesman, a former journalist who has written for The New York Times Magazine, was asked in November 2013 to join the project by Mr. Scott and his wife, Giannina, who are producing the film.

In one of the emails hacked from Sony by an unknown culprit and posted on WikiLeaks, Amy Pascal, then a co-chairwoman of Sony Pictures, called the movie “important and controversial” and said the studio was “committed passionate and enthusiastic” about making it.

But in the same email, from July 2014, she urged caution. “We need to know exactly what we can and can’t do and if this is a ‘true’ story or not,” she wrote, taking note of other movies about real events, including “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Moneyball” and “The Social Network,” all of which were later criticized to varying degrees for veering from accuracy. “I know these can be dicey waters but none more than this one,” she wrote.

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“There was never an instance where we compromised the storytelling to protect ourselves from the N.F.L.,” said Peter Landesman, the director of “Concussion.”Credit
Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated Press

In other emails, Sony executives discussed how to make the movie appear less threatening. In several emails they said that press materials should note that Mr. Smith likes football and one of his sons played the game. In another email, Hannah Minghella, a top executive, suggested that “rather than portray the N.F.L. as one corrupt organization can we identify the individuals within the N.F.L. who were guilty of denying/covering up the truth.”

Last September, Mr. Landesman wrote to Paul Hicks, the top spokesman at the N.F.L., to set up a meeting with the league’s commissioner, Roger Goodell. Mr. Hicks asked Mr. Landesman for a copy of the script, but several Sony executives were aghast that Mr. Landesman had reached out to the N.F.L. independently and the idea of a meeting was scuttled.

Mr. Landesman said in an interview that in the end he never met with Mr. Hicks because it would have worked to the N.F.L.’s advantage. He never sent the N.F.L. the screenplay, but he said he thought the N.F.L. had seen it anyway because a version was in a hacked email, though a comprehensive review of the emails by The Times did not find it.

The only comment the N.F.L. has made is that it welcomes attention to health and safety issues.

“We are encouraged by the ongoing focus on the critical issue of player health and safety,” the league said in a statement when asked to comment on the film. “We have no higher priority. We all know more about this issue than we did 10 or 20 years ago. As we continue to learn more, we apply those learnings to make our game and players safer.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 2, 2015, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Studio Altered Movie to Deter N.F.L. Protests. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe